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G2-15 Floating Ideas
G2-15 Floating Ideas
2018
Brian Clarke’s stained glass folding screen Floating Ideas displays 37 pages of the artist’s favourite poems scattered across the surface. Floating Ideas was inspired by a chance happening while Clarke was in Spain. As he recalled in 2019:
"I was in Seville, and I had a poetry book and I left it out in the sun. And the sun burnt the glue on the spine, and the wind blew the pages into the pool, and it looked beautiful. It just looked beautiful. So it was like it wasn’t my idea really: it was God’s – I just copied him. I have a book of poetry called the Oxford Book of English Poems, I think it was edited by John Hayward, and I bought it when I was at Burnley Art School. Or I might have nicked it from the bookshop down me pants, I used to do that. And it’s been with me ever since I was a teenager, and all the pages in that screen I insisted were from that book, they had to be absolutely copied from it."
This folding screen was produced with an innovative technique that eliminates the lead cames traditionally used to support and join stained glass, allowing the glass to interact freely with light and space. Floating Ideas exists in an edition of 10 unique variants plus 3 artist’s proofs, published by HENI.